The handiwork of Deezer co-founder Jonathan Benassaya, StreamNation launched to the world in July last year, serving as a platform that lets you stream and share videos and photos directly from the cloud.

Back in November, StreamNation made an interesting move by letting its users upload their own DRM-free (ripped, basically) movies and TV shows to their account, and then lend them to friends and family.

Now StreamNation has launched a new standalone companion camera app for iPhone called Shutter, delivering infinite, unlimited media storage by automatically storing photos and videos to StreamNation’s cloud-based servers. Oh, and this is completely free for everyone too – forever.

Shutter lets you take photos and videos directly within the app, and doesn’t store it to the camera roll on your device, which is a nice touch. It automatically uploads your media to the cloud (if you enable this), while making the last 500 photos available offline. You can actually edit this number though within Settings, making it ‘None’, ’200′, or ‘All until 1GB left on device’. It would be nice if there was more granular control here, letting you set an exact number.

It’s also worth noting here that you can download very specific content on a whim to make it available offline, and you can retrospectively back up any content that is on your roll already.

With Shutter, you can also share gargantuan video- and photo-files simultaneously by email or across the social sphere, as the recipient will be viewing it directly on StreamNation’s servers.

But why the need for a fresh, standalone app here – couldn’t this just be integrated directly into the main StreamNation app?

“Shutter is an app dedicated to photos and, if we want to replace the camera on your smartphone, we need an app that behaves like it’s a camera, meaning: when you start your app, you land directly on the camera and take pictures instantly,” explains Benassaya. “Shutter works so that whenever you start it, you will always land on the camera. If these features were in StreamNation, the experience would not be as efficient.”

Essentially, StreamNation has built a brand new camera app based on its own SDK. “We’ve put our iOS team into a condition as if they were external developers building an app on top of our platform,” continues Benassaya. “And we’ve learned a lot and improved our API and SDK [as a result].

The price of storage

Unlimited storage on the main StreamNation service itself (not including Shutter) costs $19/month when billed annually, which isn’t that bad when you compare it to the likes of Bitcasa which costs $99/month. Then there’s Dropbox which costs $49/month, though that’s only for 500GB of storage. But for Shutter to offer completely free, unlimited storage to everyone for life on the StreamNation platform – well, that is a big move. But there is a bigger strategical reason for doing this.

“We see Shutter as an entry point to StreamNation,” says Benassaya. “If people are happy with their usage then they will put all their media on StreamNation and convert. It’s as simple as that. There will be no ads or re-sell of any data.”

Plus, it’s worth remembering that Shutter is a dedicated camera app – one that lets you sidestep your iPhone Camera Roll completely so you’re never caught with your pants down as you hit your last KB of storage.

This actually apes a similar app called Trunx that launched earlier today, one that is also promising completely unlimited storage for life, though it’s only committing to this for new users who sign up this year. This, of course, may change at a later date.

Other neat features with Shutter include AirPlay and Chromecast support, so you can beam content to your TV, and there is a range of photo filters too that let you tweak your snaps.

Shutter for iPhone is available now. A version for Android will be arriving at some point (though no timescale is given), similar to the main StreamNation app which remains unsupported on Android too.